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The VICE Guide to Right Now: This Hawaiian Republican Is the Most Racist Candidate of 2016

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Screenshot via the Aulani Kaaihue for Congress Facebook page

There's not much reason for mainlanders to pay attention the race in Hawaii's second Congressional district, since Democratic incumbent Tulsi Gabbard is a relative lock to win the position. But Angela Aulani Kaaihue, Gabbard's Republican opponent, is making things interesting—by being such a nasty racist that her own party just denounced her and her candidacy.

Kaaihue, an "aspiring Hawaii real estate developer" whose campaign website looks like a MySpace page—complete with autoplaying music—drew headlines for a Facebook post that on Firday state GOP Chair Fritz Rohlfing called "vulgar, racially-bigoted, and religiously-intolerant... offensive, shameful, and unacceptable in public discourse."

Facebook screencap via Hawaii News Now

In a deleted Facebook post—now only available in the heavily censored version you see above—she said Japanese people were "murderous," "lieing" (sic), "stealing," and "conspirators." She told them to go back to Japan and, "eat your fucking radiation at Fukushima you fucking low life scum," among other things.

When confronted by local TV News program Hawaii News Now, she walked the statement back, but only a tiny bit. "I truly regret posting that about Japanese people. I don't think all Japanese people are bad, I just think that the non-Christian Japanese people."

Kaaihue has previously gotten attention for some signs that announced her as "healthy and cancer free" while she was thinking about running for the seat of Representative Mark Takai, who was leaving Congress due to his pancreatic cancer.

Unfortunately for the state Republican Party, she won a very low-turnout primary and is going to be on the election ballot this November, where she'll almost certainly lose—though she did say that she'd drop out if the governor of the state and "his Japanese constituents" settle some sort of lawsuit she and her family are involved in.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.


I Held Parties on the Night Tube to Save London's Nightlife

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All photos by Theo McInnes

London is the city that sleeps. While most capitals and major cities come alive at night, we're so uptight, broke and frustrated that by the time 2AM rolls around, you can pretty much hear a penny drop on the streets of Soho. And it's not like we have a choice. Over the past decade or so, each closure of an iconic club, tightening in licensing laws or mere rise in pint price has led to the general dismantling of central London's nightlife, forcing the population to stay in or stay local.

Things seemed hopeless, until recently. The unlikeliest lifeline for London's nightlife rolled in: a tube carriage. Could it be that the Underground – a place where people would rather pretend to read the same Belgravia Centre poster for 20 minutes than make eye contact – will carry new blood to the frontlines of the capital? Do we seriously think that this space, goaded across the globe for having the atmosphere of an oncology surgery, can be the medicine to warm the callous capital? Possibly, but not without my help. So I packed a bag and got ready to spend the night riding its services and bringing community back to London. I was going to save nightlife, one party at a time.

It's 1AM and I'm striding through the rain into Brixton Underground, drinking in the atmosphere. South Londoners literally have no idea what to do with this kind of freedom – one man can't contain his excitement, and just bellows "Night Tube!" repeatedly. There's a short silence until I yell back, then somebody else too and the carriage becomes a cacophony of wild calls followed by subsequent laughter.

"The night tube is a thing of beauty," Hugo, 30, (left) says. "I've been waiting for years, literally years for this. I'm south London born and bred – and we need more – but it's great not to be ignored by the city."

Soon we're scaling the escalators of Oxford Circus. Onto the Central Line we go: it's time for some after-hours stuff. So I get the glow sticks out and start beatboxing a samba beat. With glow sticks in hand, I finally I understand what these red poles are for. Of course! Well played, Sadiq.

People on the carriage gather from each side, joining in. "Have you got any booze?" they ask.

"Who needs booze when you have limbo?" I reply. Every stop inspires people to jump on our carriage, exchange japes and play-fight with one another. By the time the party has become the scene for an unlikely reunion between Phil and Jack, two childhood friends, I'm beaming. Perhaps these are the community spaces Londoners need to let go and reconnect?

Phil (left), 24, Jack (right), 24. "This is fucking ridiculous; absolutely mental." Jack says. "We went to school together in France, were best friends and haven't seen each other since. And your shitty limbo party on the Night Tube has brought us back together."

But all great things come to an end. And though an offer to follow this party as the carriage empties at Bethnal Green is tempting, this is a war already won. I have my sights set on a different prize; a place that time (and I) forgot: Snaresbrook.

Stepping off the platform at Snaresbrook, it is barren. One man stands on the adjacent platform, so I skip over and work my magic. But he's having none of it, not even a glow stick. Perhaps the people of Snaresbrook are beyond my cheap honey traps? Touring the Tory tributaries of the Essex tube, I fast realise exactly what's required to engage with denizens of this creed: a dinner party. And though there's no tarragon in my pockets or samphire in stock, I grew up watching Paul Merton's chin waggling through larks in Whose Line Is It Anyway? and know how to improvise. All it takes is a little attention to detail; a spot of love here and there.

By the time the chaps roll around, they love it! I knew they would. People gather around, tuck into Maoams and Hula Hoops to discuss the multicultural identity of London and how mice – who pour upon the tracks after the last service, traditionally – will be affected by Night Tube services.

Brett Harper, 22, (left) and Johnny Luter, 20. "We've been at a house party in Shoreditch, but now am heading back to Ashford." Johnny says. "The Night Tube means that I can now get home ASAP Rocky. Otherwise it's forking out big money on Uber cabs: the stacks of cash I've already contributed to them is ludicrous, so I'm over the moon about it."

Coming back into central, we toast over a can of Rio and head our separate ways. The night is lingering and sleeping bodies are increasing. "Liquid spillage" repeats over the tannoy at Oxford Circus, as transport officers brush past me, and eventually I pass a cordoned-off pile of piss. It's the time of night when you go soul-searching. Warming to the hum of the Victoria Line, I start fingering through my bag. It's then that an excited pair of eyes dart from behind a book. "Is that chess?" A man asks.

"It is," I reply. "Do you fancy a game?"

"Sure. I have plenty of stops left. Let's go."

It's much later and you'd think that Janos – a dealer at the Victoria Casino who's just finished work – would be done with gambling, yet he's about to take the biggest one of his life. It's a tight game and we're giggling, pressing the button on a fake clock as if to hurry one another. He's giving up pieces left, right and centre, and I almost pity the man.

Janos Banko, 32. "I work five nights a week dealing cards, so I think it is just incredible. Last week I was involved in a car accident on a night bus, so I feel really uncomfortable, almost a little bit scared riding them at the moment. So this is bliss; much safer for me and other workers."

Before I know it, Janos has managed to gobble three of my pieces and I'm staring straight at checkmate. I have to give it to Janos – he's an absolute pro when it comes to the mind, but what about matter? I unsheathe two table tennis rackets, toss him one and scream 'En garde!' We go at it, through Stratford station and beyond.

I'm swept up in a whirlwind, and only at the departure boards do we notice the time: Janos' girlfriend needs the flat keys, so he must leave. A man who can match my intensity and surpass my energy, I've never known loss as severe as waving Janos Banko farewell.

All of a sudden, the barriers feel like a prison. Blue light blankets the horizon while commuters fill the shadows left by the ghosts of the night. With heavy eyes, I take a pillow and slip into something more comfortable. For the first time tonight, I remember I'm on the London Underground. A few hours earlier this probably would've inspired some sort of impromptu sleepover, but the folks heading into central would sooner evolve into owls than turn their heads toward me.

My journey comes to an end. With a showing of new friends and a trail of citywide stations, social faux pas and paper plates behind me, in just one night I'd taught London to love again. And that's how powerful a tool the night tube can be for the city: an engaging, inclusive environment that is the yin to our current culture's yang. You needn't do more than compare the atmosphere of a tube at 1.30PM to 1.30AM to see that. Maybe each carriage can provide the city with a fluid community space in a city in which they're on the brink of extinction. Either way, it is far less ugly away from the cold light of day.

@oobahs / @theomcinnes

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Is University Still Worth It?: All The Things You’ll Learn at University That a Lecturer Will Never Teach You

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University, a time of learning, a time of mind expansion, a time of change. That said: I mean very little of the actual learning proper is done in a lecture hall. You mainly learn, like, 'the guy with the most consistent weed hookup in the first week of uni is rarely the guy you still want to be hanging out with come March.' Or, like, 'the tensile strength of a blueberry-flavoured condom handed to you in a goodie bag at a fresher's fare is rarely sufficient for actual intercourse'. You know. 'A late-night visit to the Big Tesco for a morning after pill is exceptionally unfun.' 'No panic like the dreadful first panic of ejaculating unbidden into a person!'. That sort of thing. There are loads of lessons you learn. But can you learn those lessons in a library? No. You have to learn them out there, in the real world. You have to spend—say it with me now—a few terms at the University of Life.

Alternatively: just read this informative and shareable article, front-to-back and back again, a few times, commit it entirely to memory, and try not to make the same mistakes I made at university! Thank you! My only wish is that you live a better life than me!

(Photo: uclu photosoc, via)

THE FINE AND INTRICATE ART OF LAUNDRY

I first learned to do laundry in the tiny laundry alcove at my student halls of residence. The laundry alcove was hell, by the way. They say kids have it good these days because they are not drafted into the army at a young age and forced to die on beaches at war, but then have you ever tried to bag a washer and a dryer in a 20-load capacity room at a laundry alcove shared by some 500 students? On a Thursday, the one day of the week the oversubscribed psychology department has off, so the one day of the week they do their laundry? Hundreds of girls with mediocre A-Levels who just learned about the autistic spectrum and 'are getting a read on you' trying to wash their duvet covers at the same time? No. It is impossible. Doing your laundry becomes some vampiric and Herculian task: you find yourself, at 1am, an alarm on your phone going off, shuffling in flip flops down four flights of stairs and across a courtyard just so you can bag a washer and use it without someone taking your clothes out and dumping them on a detergent-covered floor. You find yourself shuttling great sacks of still-warm bedding back to your room under the cover of darkness. You learn to covet 20p pieces—the only coin these awful machines will take—like they are hewn from gold. Halls of residence laundry needs turn you into a monster.

But it also made me love laundry. Because your mum has always done your laundry for you, hasn't she, apart from that one weekend she went away and you tried to wash a football kit and the whole thing somehow ended wound around the outside of the drum and the callout charge to fix it was in the hundreds, and now your mum just straight up insists she does your laundry for you, doesn't she? But now you're here, alone, and all your pants are dirty, and you need to know the difference between bio and non-bio. Learn to love it. Welcome to Big Boy School.

There are, of course, students who shuttle their laundry home for their mum to do, taking weekly car journeys back home just to get their towels washed. I call these students 'scum'. They are doomed to fail in the adult world. They are the people you will one day have working beneath you. They are the vermin, they are nothing, they are nothing. But you—you, with your static-free dryer sheets, and your colour catcher, and your fragrance pods, and your non-itchy detergent choices—you are the king. The King of the Laundry. Revel in it, your highness.

LEARNING HOW TO TOLERATE REALLY BORING LADS CALLED TOM

The most important skill you can learn as an adult is being able to tolerate extremely dry getting-to-know-you banter with tall emotionless lads called Tom, Toms growing like reeds at student parties, Toms everywhere at student parties, somehow looking too big for the room, the Toms, their necks craned against the ceiling, Toms crowbarred in by fridges, Toms somehow sitting between seven or eight people on the same sofa, Toms drinking their own small four-can stash of warm Carling, Toms in zip-thru cardigans, Toms in the queue for the bathroom, Toms bringing the vibe down by merely existing, Toms somehow eating an oven pizza even though this isn't their house, isn't their oven, there is a chance Tom bought his own pizza to this party, in a Sainsbury's bag, which begs the question: why, of all the pizzas to bring to a party, why ham and pineapple?

Sample dialogue with lads called Tom:

"Y'alright?"

Or:

"What course you doing?"

Or;

"What's your favourite film? I'll start: have you ever heard of Batman Begins?"

Toms will haunt your entire life from now. Toms silently standing and eating muesli in your shareflat. Toms wearing three-quarter zip tactical fleece tops to your office's Dress Down Friday. Tom the only friend you've made in a new city, so you spend an evening after work doing a big Holland & Barrett shop with him. Tom from accounts is the only person who responded to your all-office 'Pint?' e-mail on a Friday night so here you are, sat in silence, Tom occasionally staring at a nearby group and whispering "pretty girls". Tom, with his lone season ticket to a League 2 club. Tom, the man who always seems to stand next to you on the train home, in his Karrimor trainers. Tom's immaculate tidy grey bedroom. Tom's well-paid job in computing. Learn to deal with Toms – learn to extricate yourself from conversation with them, learn that every vague offer to hang out at the weekend that you say a reluctant "yeah" to is cast in iron, learn never to live with them because they get up at 6am to do pull-ups – learn to deal with them now, so you are better armed for the real world, fierce and full of Tommies.

(Photo: Gordon Joly, via)

HOW TO COOK AT LEAST ONE MEAL THAT ISN'T A DIRECT ASSAULT ON YOUR BODY

Everyone can cook three things when they arrive at university: pasta-and-pesto, beans on toast, and that 'family recipe' Bolognese sauce your mum taught you. That's it. Some people can do toasties, some can't. Some guy thinks he knows how to do a stir fry but does something fundamental and mad with it, like using half a bottle of olive oil. Absolutely nobody can nail rice. Soon your diet becomes cheese, slices of chorizo, overcooked pasta, margarine on toast. You are yellow and you are dying. You are young so you can survive this. If you were 80, your diet would currently have you in hospital. You are eating so badly it would kill your nan. By Year Two, you need to up your game and know how to at least do fucking something with lentils, or you're not going to make it to 21.

WHETHER OR NOT YOU LIKE A FINGER IN THERE

Don't ask me what that means! Just everyone just seems to find this information out! At university!

HOW TO DRINK

Chances are you will rock up at university with about 18 months' worth of good, hard drinking experience under your belt – you've been served three times now without needing ID! You've had vodka AND whisky! You can almost tell the difference between Carling and Fosters! – but, sadly, you're still trash at the fine and subtle art of drinking. Like: garbage. You are a garbage drinker. The worst of the scum. Sorry.

This is good, because everyone is on the same level. If I was going to give any advice to a fresh, dewy-eyed first year, I would basically say 'never boast about how good you are at drinking in an effort to make friends'. Firstly: nobody cares, this is not a good friend-making tactic. Secondly: you are setting yourself up for a fall. But does it stop people consistently, year after year, making this exact mistake? Of saying 'sambuca? Two please!' and then, 30 to 40 minutes later, 'call an ambulance, Lucas, my brain is dying!'? It does not. You're going to learn how to drink. The next three years are going to be alcoholic chaos. But for week one, just try not to tell everyone that definitely-true-no-really story about how you were 'so stoned' and did 'like, a hundred shots in Zante' and now you're 'ready for pound-a-pint night, I've bought £60! Awoogah!', just for your ego's sake.

(Photo: Samuel Cockman, via)

YOU HAVE A WEIRD ACCENT, OR DO SOMETHING WEIRD WITH TEA THAT OTHER PEOPLE CANNOT GET THEIR HEAD AROUND, OR LIKE YOU DO SOMETHING WRONG WITH BEANS ON TOAST, ESSENTIALLY EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT WAS NORMAL ABOUT YOU IS ACTUALLY WRONG

The first day I realised I had a northern accent was when I asked for a 'mug' in a share kitchen filled with people from Oxford and they all took the piss out of my vowel sounds, and to be honest I'm still not over it, ten years on.

HOW A BLOWBACK WORKS

It's funny watching hard kids who think they know about drugs getting patiently explained what a blowback is by the craggy-looking stoner on your floor at Halls, and equally entertaining seeing them then get their first blowback. This includes you. This definitely includes me. I still don't entirely know and I've never had one. Look: is it a sex thing or not?

YOU ONLY UNDERSTAND HOW WEIRD ENGLAND IS THROUGH THE PRISM OF AN INTERNATIONAL STUDENT

I only realised what a fucked up culture we had when I had to explain to an American girl what a chip butty was. The steepness of the learning curve at university is essentially figuring out how little you actually do know, about yourself, your chosen subject, or the world as a whole, and no more is that true than when you and some Dutch dude are arguing with an American about the meaning of the word "zucchini" .

EVERY SMALL TOWN IDEA OF BEING COOL YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD BEFORE WILL BE BLOWN OUT OF THE WATER BY ONE BOY IN HALLS WHO KNOWS BETWEEN SIX AND EIGHT GUITAR CHORDS

'Mike' knows how to roll joints one-handed and hasn't been to a single one of his psychology lectures yet, and you think he is so cool you start growing your hair out long just to be more like him.

SOME PEOPLE HAVE BASICALLY NEVER LIVED IN A HOUSE BEFORE, AS BEST I CAN TELL?

A lot of the people you are going to have to share living quarters with over the next three years were raised in the wild, they are feral children, they were discovered living wild with the wolves at the age of 15, growling and snapping, and immediately made to do GCSEs and didn't have time to learn stuff, like, 'don't use plates with food on them like an ashtray' or 'please do not spraypaint your name on the share kitchen windows, we all just lost our deposit' and like 'don't keep raw chicken meat in a cupboard? Keep it in the fridge? Especially over Easter holiday? I've been wondering what that smell was for four straight days? What the fuck, dude? Jesus?'

(Photo: hackNY.org, via)

HOW TO LOOK AFTER YOURSELF WHEN YOU ARE ILL

This is the most harrowing adult life lesson you will ever learn. When you are a kid being sick is great: you call downstairs in a weak voice and put on some amateur dramatics to secure a day off school, and then you spend it under a duvet with pillows plumped in front of the TV, your mum bringing you soup and treats, you get to drink Calpol, you get to eat cereal for dinner, whatever you like sweetheart, oh my poor baby. Then you get fresher's flu like, six seconds into your first day at university and nobody will go to the shops for you and all you have in the cupboard is a big thing of pasta and no vitamins, so you have to drag you own festering carcass to Tesco for orange juice, lozenges and own-brand Lemsip, and you have to get a taxi back to halls because you're so exhausted, and because you're looking after yourself and nobody will help you your cold lasts like 18 days and you can only really bring yourself to eat fromage frais for some reason in that time, and you call your mum, your voice all weak, you just need a hug and a hand on the forehead, you just need someone to tell you you're good, and she just goes: 'Is this a real cold or one of those ones you always used to have two weeks into term at school? Like fucking clockwork, Joel. I never believed it.'

READING BOOKS IS EXTREME BULLSHIT

Academia in general is. Academia stops being a noble pursuit of knowledge about a week-and-a-half into university, and instead becomes you in jeans and a T-shirt wandering lost around the department corridors going 'hold on, do I have to submit a paper copy? I thought we just had to submit in online! I NEED £8 WORTH OF PRINTER CREDIT, IMMEDIATELY.' So quickly your attitude turns from 'I'm not here to have fun, I'm here for a better future' to 'second year is the only year that counts, anyway' then, 'actually you can make it all up on your third year dissertation', that university soon becomes this constant lie you tell yourself, that the bare minimum is actually more than enough. Think: is there any other time in your life you will congratulate yourself for leaving something so late that you had to stay up all night in a library doing it just to make a very conservative deadline? There is not. There was not a single assignment I submitted in my third year that wasn't written between the hours of midnight and 4am while absolutely off my nut on Diet Pepsi. This is why I only got a 2.1, in English, a language I already fluently knew.

YOU WILL BE ASTOUNDED BY THE SHEER NUMBER OF EPISODES OF THE SAME TV SHOW YOU CAN WATCH IN A SINGLE DAY

Right: no you've put it off long enough now, that essay was set three weeks ago and now it's due, you've put a day aside, you're going to focus, crack the back of it, source and secondary source and tertiary source, really up that overall grade, edge it up to a 2:1, Let's Do This. Only... only one episode of Friday Night Lights can't hurt, can it? Mm: one more, that finale had a cliffhanger. One more. Then watch another with your lunch – you can't type and eat a sandwich at the same time! – then work. Then: hold on, how did you just watch 35 episodes of Friday Night Lights? Did... did you just defy the laws of time and space? Are... are you God?

(Photo: uclu photosoc, via)

NOTHING TOPS OFF A NIGHT OUT LIKE AN OASIS SONG

Sometimes it is hard to admit who you are even to yourself, and no more is that true when it is 1AM and the lights are coming up and you are soaked to the core in your own dancing sweat and the DJ drops 'Don't Look Back In Anger' and you are just howling it, every word of it, eyes closed and you are bent double, and you don't even like Oasis but this is somehow the most important set of words in the most vital order ever summoned, like this just means everything to you, everything, and when that last lingering note fuzzes away to nothing you're just stood there in the middle of the dancefloor, alone, arms extended out like a statue of Jesus, and you are such a prick, man, good lord, don't you even know?

FOR SOME REASON EVERY UNIVERSITY TOWN HAS A UNIQUE AND CARB-HEAVY POST-CLUB SNACK THAT TRANSCENDS BEING IMPORTANT TO YOU AND ACTUALLY BECOMES, LIKE, ICONIC

Every university down has its own foodstuff that you cannot buy anywhere else and you do not know who invented it or how but somehow it is 2AM and you are in a shitty kebab shop in like, Southampton, asking for some exceptionally mad-named shit like 'cheesy nash', and you walk home eating a load of chips and mozzarella and BBQ sauce out of a pizza box, and you get home and join a Facebook group about cheesy nash, and you go home and scoff at the kebab shops that do not have cheesy nash, your drunkenness is bereft without it, somehow a pitta full of wan chips doesn't hit the spot anymore, you can only get drunk in Southampton, you can only fend off a hangover with cheesy nash, you wake up one day with it on you and down you, you realise truly what a mess you have become.

THE MOST ABRASIVE THING ANOTHER HUMAN BEING CAN DO, AND I INCLUDE WAR IN THIS, IS KEEP YOU AWAKE DESPITE YOU ALREADY ASKING THEM TWICE TO BE QUIET

"Hey guys! Not to be a 'square' but I do have an exam in the morning and you guys have been up in the kitchen smoking and shouting in Spanish for... ooh, two hours now. So if you could just keep the noise down thank you very much."

"Guys, hi! Sorry – yawn – me again. Only it's 2AM now and I did say I have to be up at— oh, you're just quieting down now. Of course. Sorry!"

" hiya, yeah: can you go and do that in your room, please? Only my dorm is next to the kitchen and— yeah, that's great, thanks guys. It's just I don't want to have to call the— no, great, thanks, bye."

At 4AM the fire alarm goes off and somehow you just know who did it before you've ever fully stirred from your slumber. Still, it's... god, it's September. Only... eight more months of this? Didn't you used to be cool? Didn't you used to not care about shit like this?

(Photo: Jake Lewis, via)

YOU'RE NOT ACTUALLY SMART IN THAT ENGAGED AND SELF-PROPELLING WAY

Yeah I mean you did well at your A-levels didn't you and you got all those GCSEs and your mum was so proud she promised to pay for your Glastonbury ticket next year to say well done but then the first time you encounter an actual smart person, someone who can actually think and not just regurgitate page 88 of the textbook, then your heart jumps up to your throat and you feel like you're in a falling elevator and everything you thought you knew about what you think turns out to be false. Because you are dumb as shit, man. Your lecturer is all, "What did Kant say in Grounding for the Metaphys—" and some nerd kid who always sits at the front already has his hand up and is answering and asking a question at the same time, "do you think the loneliness of the human spirit is connected to blah blah bloo", and you are like: hold up, I was still taking a note down, is this shit something we have to revise or what? Sadly, you have been overtaken in a way you will never catch up to: you are dumb now, and you will never not be dumb. You will never smart up to that level. True smartness is self-fulfilling, self-propelling, every second of being alive is an adventure in learning new stuff, but basically you will never truly know that because you just found your level, found your waterline, and that waterline is 're-reading the notes a couple of times off the blackboard and calling that 45-minute session some pretty solid revision'.

STUDENT COMEDY, ACTING, WRITING AND ART IS THE ABSOLUTE DIRT WORST THING IN THE WORLD

The funniest guy at your university is just quoting Family Guy episodes you haven't seen yet, the sooner you figure that out the better.

INTRODUCING YOUR BACK-HOME FRIENDS TO YOUR UNI FRIENDS IS LIKE INTRODUCING TWO HALVES OF YOURSELF TO EACH OTHER AND BEING EMBARRASSED BY THEM BOTH

All your back-home mates have piled down in a Fiat to see you and keep making in-jokes about your old science teacher and how funny that thing you did once six years ago was, and all your new uni mates keep sipping cheap red wine and laughing tightly through their lips, and all your back-home mates have to be signed in to the Union and pay £2 extra to get in, and all of your uni mates turn up to the club at midnight because they were waiting outside the back of Tesco for them to throw all the old lasagnes away, and essentially: everyone you know is bad, there is no getting around this.

HOW TO CHANGE A DUVET COVER ON YOUR OWN

Step one: realise you are alone now, and nobody will ever help you again. Step two: Put your hands in the inside-out duvet cover, grab two corners of the duvet, take it to a staircase and shake it over the gap. Just flop it about like crazy. Doesn't matter if someone is trying to come upstairs with a full bowl of soup. Not my problem.

YOU CAN KEEP A FRIENDSHIP GOING FOR THREE YEARS JUST BY NODDING AT THEM EVERY WEEK IN YOUR SEMINAR

There were like three lads I was friends with through university who I met during freshers' week and just nodded at wordlessly for three years because I didn't really know much more about them beyond 'I had met them once'. If I ever forgot their name I just called them 'Chris'. They were always called Chris.

YOU'RE AN ADULT IN PURGATORY

This is the thing about university: technically, yes, you are on your own and independent, you are in control of your finances and your food intake and how you spend your time, you can stay up late and get pissed and eat just a whole thing of Pringles and bread because you are accountable to no one, nobody owns you, nobody rules you, You Are The King, but then also you are extremely scared of the fact that everything you do or don't do feels like it somehow matters, that this is the last obstacle you need to scramble through before you crawl into Full Adulthood, and the time somehow goes too slowly and too quickly at once, you could feasibly bust all these lectures and coursework out in about six months flat, but instead you are here, revving on the start line, filled with this sort of dread that the world might move on and shift in the three years it takes you to be technically ready for it, oh god, some of your mates back home are already making money, moving out, buying cars, maybe you should have got a job instead, maybe learning is for nothing, oh god, oh fuck, you played by the rules and yet everything is tearing apart beneath you, oh fuck oh god, was three years of this really worth a few nights out at the Union and 10% off at Topshop. And that's the real lesson you learn at university: whether it is or isn't worth it, whether it's the best thing or worst thing you will ever do, a lesson you can only truly learn that by going through it. Okay! Have fun! Rubber up!

@joelgolby

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My Life as a Sugar Baby

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Not the author. Photo by Flickr user Silentmind8 via

This article originally appeared on VICE France

When I was in high school, my life was like that of any other teen. I wasn't exactly a nun, but nothing foreshadowed that a couple of years in the future, I'd feel the urge to fill my days with sex. I studied hard, I smoked, I drank and I had sex. My sex life was relatively unbridled but in hindsight it would be fair to say that I was already a bit bored with it at that time. The boys I slept with were hopeless and I quickly grew tired of them. The sex never lasted more than five minutes, and after, that boy would ask me something like: "Was it good?" and I'd lie every time.

I sometimes cringe when I think about all the embarrassing moments you go through when you're a sexually active teenager. Explaining to a boy that he can't penetrate your clit, him trying anyway, no foreplay. I think I truly lost my patience when some guy started fingering my navel.

I moved to Montpellier in the south of France for university. Most of the students there were misfits studying the humanities, and in this more relaxed environment I gradually learned to listen to my instincts. In this city where I knew no one, I felt free to do whatever I wanted without anyone knowing. In the bars my girlfriends and I went to, I never met any guy I liked. I wanted to find some older men – with more sexual experience than my male peers – and I didn't want any of my friends to meddle in that. So I decided to start looking for older men online, and not through regular dating sites.

I signed up to sugardaters.fr – the biggest website for French sugar daddies, sugar mummies, sugar babies and toy boys to connect. A sugar daddy is a man of a certain age who maintains a girl much younger than himself – the sugar baby – in exchange for sexual services. A sugar daddy and a sugar baby establish a sort of relationship when they meet – more like that of a traditional couple, than of a sex worker and a client.

After signing up for the site, I was immediately bombarded with messages – all from men in their 40s and 50s. You can find any type of guy on the website. Most noticeable are the guys who are gagging for it. They accost you by telling you that your photos give them a hard on, and they're a right pain. But for the most part it's guys who write you a nice message trying to make you believe that they're interested in your personality.

The idea of the millionaire sugar daddy with four yachts and nine villas who sweeps you off your feet and takes you away every weekend doesn't exist. Or if he does, I've never met him. Generally the men on the site are affluent but not to an extreme extent. They're usually managers, engineers or doctors. I have no doubt some of them are married and want to escape the routine of married life without having to find a proper girlfriend or file for divorce.

The first guy I met invited me to go to Aix-en-Provences – a student city in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. He said he had a holiday home there, where he'd often go for the weekend to relax. Or, more likely as evidenced by the tan line left on his ring finger, to fuck a woman who wasn't his wife. It didn't bother me – it had been clear right from the start that I hadn't come to play Scrabble. And neither had he.

After the introductions and about 15 minutes of mandatory chit-chat, we went to the pool. I didn't bring a bathing suit so we quickly skipped to the reason we were there in the first place. The guy wasn't half-bad and while it was just the first time, I didn't have to fake an orgasm. Sleeping with someone like that is a bit like taking a line of coke: the supply creates the demand. We fucked all weekend and I got a new handbag and 300 euros (£257) out of it.

People like to describe sugar dating as a form of prostitution, but I really never did it for the money. It's not like I turned up my nose at those benefits – I often asked for a little perfume, a handbag, a massage or just a nice weekend away. Those little things spiced up my life a bit. I never had the means to move into a bigger apartment – and I never intended to.

After my first positive experience, I decided not to stop at just one man. I wanted to meet as many as possible. Back in Montpellier I wrote to about ten men whose profiles were pretty similar to the one I had met in Aix-en-Provence. Pretty soon, I began to meet a new one every week.

I've never made a list, but I think I must have met between 80 and 100 men through the site. In the beginning, I mostly fucked them just for fun. I'd talk to a guy a bit before meeting with him, to know what kind of person he was before I slept with him. But it quickly became a routine, and that routine went from doing it whenever I felt like it, to doing it whenever I had the opportunity. It became just about sex, and I didn't really care to know who it was with. If I wasn't having an orgasm, I was bored.

The endorphins that gave me such an immense rush after an orgasm worked like a drug on me. The moment when I realised I might be taking this sugar baby thing a bit too far, was when I one day found myself undressing even before the guy I was meeting had got to my house. So I decided to try something different: swingers clubs.

During the first months I frequented one, I would get off on all sorts of new kinky stuff, but I soon shifted to threesomes, gang bangs – and I recently participated in a double gang bang, where I watched another woman get fucked by a group of men until it was my turn. For a while, I was very drawn towards glory holes – getting penetrated by a penis coming out of a hole without even seeing the face belonging with the penis was an ideal way to get a quick fix.

That craving of a quick fix has been a part of my life for about a year now, and I know I won't get rid it easily. Other people kill time playing video games, I sleep with strangers in their 40s and 50s. What started as a desire to sleep with experienced men spiralled into some form of undiagnosed sex addiction.

I guess I should soon want a different life. I should, at some point, get over my craving, grow up, get married, buy a house, have some children, get a dog and finally file for divorce like everyone else. I sometimes feel weird and guilty that I don't live my life in a way that's judged conventionally sexually healthy, but the pleasure I get from it still outweighs the shame. I'm 22 now, and I know it has to stop some time. I might have to go find help to get over it. But it seems a terribly boring prospect to me now.

The author writes for VICE France under a pseudonym.

More on VICE:

The Often Lucrative but Sometimes Oppressive Lifestyle of a Male Sugar Baby

I'm Addicted to Giving Women Thousands of Pounds Because It Makes Me Feel Like a Sexy Idiot

A Sex Therapist Explains What Terrible Things Can Happen if You Like Sex Too Much

The Law Needs to Catch Up, but Look: Weed Is Effectively Legal in the UK

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Some people enjoying 4/20 in Hyde Park (Photo: Jake Lewis)

Arrests for cannabis possession in England and Wales have fallen by 46 percent since 2010. Cautions have dropped by 48 percent and charges by 33 percent.

In July of 2015, Durham's police chief said cannabis growers will only be targeted if they're growing commercially, and that users wouldn't be targeted unless they smoke it in a "blatant" way.

That same month, Sara Thornton, Leader of the National Police Chiefs Council, said policing weed has "never been a top priority", adding that police forces are more likely to simply "record" reports of small-scale cannabis farms, rather than investigating them.

Four more police chiefs across the country followed Durham's lead soon after, making similar announcements. One even acknowledged that cannabis can have medicinal benefits – a direct contradiction to British law, which says there are no medical uses for the drug.

Today, it was revealed that only one in four people caught with weed are actually charged, and that 40 percent are let off with a caution.

For whatever reason (most likely: targets and antiquated attitudes), a select few police forces are still gunning for weed users – West Midlands Police reported a 40 percent rise in cannabis arrests earlier this year, and there's still a huge disparity in how police target people of different races. In London, for example, black people are charged for cannabis possession at five times the rate of white people, and cautioned three times more.

But looking at all of the above, you could make a convincing case that weed has essentially been decriminalised across much of the country, because if the odds are as low as they are that you'll be arrested and charged for smoking it or growing it, what's the difference? I'm not saying that's what you should do, of course, because it is still very much illegal by law – but, you know, there just aren't very many people that bothered about enforcing this particular law.

Now all that needs to happen is for Westminster to catch up with the police. Although, judging by the majority of politicians' absolute refusal to engage in any kind of grown-up debate on the topic, it's unlikely that's going to happen any time soon.

More on VICE:

The NHS Is Trialling a Cannabis Vape Pen, So I Tried It for Myself

People in the West Midlands Are Really Into Growing Weed

Why People Think Potheads Are Lazy: A History

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.


Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty

US News

Another 15,000 Clinton Emails to Be Released
A federal judge has ordered the State Department to release 15,000 more emails uncovered by the FBI during its investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server. The emails could be released just weeks before the election in November. Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Clinton told Kimmel the emails would be "so boring."—The New York Times

FBI Investigating Virginia Knife Attack for ISIS Links
The FBI has launched an investigation into a weekend stabbing in Roanoke, Virginia, examining if the attacker may have been trying to behead his victim. The accused attacker, 20-year-old Wasil Farooqui, was arrested Saturday after a man and woman were stabbed at an apartment complex. The victims were hospitalized.—ABC News

Ryan Lochte Dropped by Four Sponsors
Four major sponsors have dropped Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte, including swimwear giant Speedo and fashion label Ralph Lauren. They were followed by Gentle Hair Removal and Japanese mattress maker Airweave. It comes after Lochte admitted to lying about being robbed at gunpoint in Rio.—CNN

Economists Choose Gary Johnson Over Trump
A majority of members of the National Association of Business Economics—55 percent—believe Hillary Clinton would be the best president to handle the US economy. Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson came in second with 15 percent, and only 14 percent said Donald Trump would do the "best job."—The Wall Street Journal

International News

Turkey Strikes ISIS and Kurdish Targets in Syria
The Turkish army has launched artillery strikes against ISIS in northern Syria. The Turkish bombardment has also struck Kurdish YPG positions in and around the Syrian town of Manbij. Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has said ISIS should be "completely cleansed" from its border region.—BBC News

Sarkozy Bids to Become French President Again
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has launched a bid to win back the presidency, announcing he will seek his party's nomination to run in the 2017 presidential election. "I feel I have the strength to lead the fight at such a turbulent moment in our history," wrote the former president, who held power between 2007 and 2012.—Al Jazeera

Pakistan Forces Raid MQM Party Headquarters
Pakistani paramilitary forces have sealed the headquarters of the powerful Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) political party in Karachi and detained five of its leaders, after party supporters attacked the office of a TV channel. Weapons were recovered from the headquarters of the MQM, and five leaders were taken into custody.—Reuters

Mexican President Accused of Plagiarizing Thesis
Mexico's president, Enrique Peña Nieto, filled about 30 percent of his undergraduate law thesis with paragraphs from books, according to a report. Journalist Carmen Aristegui found 197 paragraphs bearing remarkable similarity to the work of others. A presidential spokesman dismissed the similarities as "errors of style."—VICE News

Everything Else

Sleigh Bells Sue Demi Lovato
Indie-rock duo Sleigh Bells filed a lawsuit against Demi Lovato, claiming the singer's track "Stars" rips off elements of its 2010 song "Infinity Guitars." The suit claims the similarities "transcend the realm of coincidence."—Rolling Stone

McDonald's Is Loving Kayne West's Poem
McDonald's has responded to Kanye West's poem in Frank Ocean's new zine, called "The McDonald's Man," which refers to french fries as "evil." A spokeswoman said: "We're lovin' the love for McDonald's World Famous Fries."—TIME

'Ben-Hur' Flopped Worse Than Reported
Final box office numbers show Ben-Hur made only $11.2 million on its opening weekend, lower than the $11.35 million previously reported by Paramount. The remake cost $100 million to produce.—USA Today

Kobe Bryant Launches Silicon Valley Fund
The ex-NBA star and Los Angeles–area investor Jeff Stibel announced that they are putting together a $100 million fund to invest in media and tech companies. Bryant has already invested in mobile gaming and juice-making.—VICE News

Noodles Now Most Valuable Commodity in Prison
Ramen noodles have become the most valuable commodity in US prisons, according to a new study. Prisoners are so unhappy with prison food that ramen noodles have become more valuable than cigarettes.—VICE

These Bright, Surreal Pictures Redefine Still-Life Photography

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This story appeared in the August issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Jessica Pettway, a visual artist based in New York, specializes in still-life photos that show everyday objects in surreal arrangements, bent and contorted into bizarre, often unrecognizable forms, all in bright, almost aggressively cheerful colors. Her work has been exhibited widely in New York.

Confessions of a Teenage Lifeguard

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Image via Shutterstock

I grew up in Minnesota, where lakes are a dime-a-dozen and summer is punishingly humid. From when I was 16 years old to when I turned 21, I spent those long summer days as a lifeguard—first on a city beach and then at a private tennis club pool. I was a bratty, chronically hungover party girl, and I was in charge of making sure your kids didn't die.

It was the best job I've ever had.

As a sophomore in high school, I signed up for a six-week training course after my two best friends—who were on the swim team—convinced me to join them. I was decidedly not a swimmer and waking up at 4 AM to work out for two hours every day sounded like torture, but I also liked watching our high school men's swim team romp around in speedos.

Despite my penchant for showing up to class smelling like an empty bottle of booze, I was hired to guard lives at a small, slightly dingy lake located about five miles north of my house. The beach was full of creepy ass dudes; I can't count the number of times a leathery 50-year-old in a Speedo, or a drunk frat bro, or a respectable-looking father of four, told me he was going to drown on purpose so I could give him mouth-to-mouth.

The worst creeps were the old guys who filmed or photographed young women, which happened more than a few times. Cameras and camcorders were banned (this was before camera phones were common), and when we saw them being used, we'd tell whoever was using them that they needed to put them away. We were lenient when it was a mom or dad filming their kids, but groups of teenagers and dirty old men who came by themselves raised red flags.

One time, I noticed an older man alone with a camcorder unmistakably trained on two underage girls. I radioed up to my manager, who confronted the man and confiscated his tape. We hauled him off and reviewed the tape; close-ups of women's chests, small children's butts, and my 16-year old boobs were on full display. The old man sat crying softly with his head in his hands, and my manager ducked out to wait for the cops in the parking lot, leaving me alone in a cement room with a man who had just videotaped both my boobs and the nether regions of small children. I stood nervously by the door until James, an assistant manager, came running in to rescue me.

James was a studly 21-year-old college track star I spent that first summer lusting after. We flirted heavily, but I was young and he had a girlfriend, so I was pleasantly surprised when he started calling me late at night to complain about her. Our clichéd forbidden romance came to a head at the very end of the summer with a night of mediocre drunk sex. In the morning, we awoke to a phone call from his girlfriend, and he drove me home begging me not to tell anyone because he could get in trouble. So much for summer love.

Lest you think my experience lifeguarding was entirely dealing with saggy perverts and affairs with my superiors, I actually saved people, too. There was a kid who'd come to the beach with his older friends that we had to rescue at least once a week. He couldn't swim, so when his friends would head out to the floating dock, he'd follow them beyond the buoys that marked the deep end and we'd end up dragging his ass back to shore.

The thing about people who are actively drowning is that they're hard to spot. There's no splashing, no screaming, no frantic pleas for help. You can usually tell someone is having trouble when he or she stop moving forward and start vertically bobbing up and down, but even then some people are just treading water. I once jumped in to help a girl I thought was about to slip under only to have her swim away like a fucking dolphin, leaving me floating around on my guard tube with a lake full of people staring at me.

The worst days at the beach were when our certification company, Ellis, would come in to audit our skills and reaction times. We'd get no warning, and Ellis agents would come dressed in plain clothes to secretly watch. One day, I noticed what looked like the body of a small child floating under the murky waves. I've never been more terrified in my life. I blew my whistle and tore off into the lake after the body, which turned out to be a child-size dummy. It was an audit, but I had to act like it was the real thing, because I knew I'd get fired if I fucked up protocol. The other guards cleared the water as I gently pulled the dummy out of the lake. With a crowd of confused beachgoers circling around me, I performed CPR on the dummy.

It was both a relief and a disappointment when I eventually quit the beach to work at a private tennis club. Since rich kids typically get swimming lessons from birth, my days of heart-pounding rescues came to an abrupt end.


Our biggest issue at the club was the phantom pooper, who would show up every few weeks and drop a giant deuce in the bottom of the diving well. Usually we'd scoop the poop in the leaf skimmer, dump in a bunch of chemicals, and the pool would be swim-ready in a few hours. But sometimes the phantom pooper got the runs, and poking the shit with the leaf skimmer resulted in a giant brown cloud that infested the length of the diving well. When that happened, we'd push the cloud toward the filter, pump in even more chemicals, close for the night, and hope the pool was clear when we opened up the next morning.

There's an episode of This American Life that features a 60-something man who, despite going to college, law school, and starting a career as a lawyer, still spends every summer lifeguarding because he can't bear to give it up. I feel him. Summer means something different to lifeguards. Every day is different, unpredictable, and impossible to plan. I miss the days of opening the beach, tanning my skin in the afternoon heat, and diving into the waves after a child who's just slipped under. I miss feeling sand under my toes, the relief of hot skin meeting cold water, and the rush of a rescue. That 60-something man was on to something: Real life can wait for the winter.


Do the Rape Allegations Against Nate Parker Make It Wrong to Support 'Birth of a Nation'?

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In the past week, one of this fall's most hotly anticipated films has gone from Oscar bait to ethical quandary. Based on Nat Turner's 1831 slave rebellion, Nate Parker's fiery Birth of a Nation has run into controversial territory after the resurfacing of rape accusations against him and his writing partner Jean Celestin that stem from when the pair were students at Penn State University in 1999. Although Parker was ultimately acquitted (Celestin was convicted, but the verdict was overturned after an appeal), questions remain, and many have been outraged to learn that the victim later killed herself. Now there's the additional thorny question of what viewers ought to do with the film, which has received full-throated and near-universal praise since its triumphant festival debut (and $17.5 million acquisition prize) at Sundance in January.

"What's disheartening for me is the conversation around it and how so many people are quick to defend Nate Parker, defend Jean Celestin, defend the whole situation," Yaba Blay, an Africana studies professor at Drexel University, told VICE. "I'm a survivor, and we have to take stand in a lot of different ways, especially with these artists because we send a powerful message when we support them."

From noted feminist author Roxane Gay at the New York Times to Tarana Burke at Colorlines, we certainly know who's not going to see the movie. Many black feminists in particular have taken a hard stance against Parker and Celestin—even if the film contains a powerful narrative of slave resistance, to support it would be to support rape culture, they argue. But presumably not everyone will boycott Birth of a Nation. So does buying that ticket mean those who flock to theaters October 7 are betraying women, supporting rape culture, or otherwise committing themselves to being a part of "the problem"? Not that seeing or not seeing a film will end rape culture or bring back the traumatized victim, who committed suicide in 2012. The question is in many ways more fundamental: Can—and should—we separate the actions of artists from the content of their art?

"I do think black women are tired," said Natalie Bullock Brown, a film professor at Saint Augustine's University currently producing Baartman, Beyonce & Me, about how dominant beauty ideals impact black women. "If you look at who has been hopping up to defend black manhood of late, and really throughout history, black women have always been at the forefront. What I'm sensing from black women who are wanting to break ranks is, 'I'm tired of supporting you when you don't support us.'"

Aside from people like Al Sharpton, the public seems to be turning against Parker. In many ways, his story echoes that of artists like R. Kelly, accused of abusing under-aged girls, or wife-beater Miles Davis, or alleged rapist Bill Cosby, or alleged child molester Woody Allen, or fugitive sex criminal Roman Polanski. The same old questions about whether a creator's behavior can taint his (always his) art apply.

But though Parker is obviously the main creative force behind Birth of a Nation, there are other actors involved whose work is well worth supporting, including Colman Domingo, Aunjanue Ellis, Gabrielle Union, and Roger Guenveur Smith. And there are even clear-headed reasons to support Parker himself, which have nothing to do with buying into conspiracy theories about taking down the black man or why his rap sheet, hidden in plain view, grew to prominence so close to the film's debut. It is possible to believe that despite his acquittal, Parker did something heinous, but also that he, like everyone, is capable of redemption and transformation.

"I want us to be more empathetic and more compassionate with one another. That's the type of feminism I'm here for," Brown said. "I would like to see that extension of grace. Talk about how he's going to use his celebrity to address these issues. I think it would help some of us feel like, 'OK, he's a work in progress. He is moving in a direction I can get with that can honor because he's owning his stuff.' I want to support that."

What makes this controversy all the more important is that Birth of Nation tells a story most Americans never hear: Black slaves didn't acquiesce to their lot, they actively resisted. Scholars will tell you many enslaved people damaged tools and crops, fought and poisoned their owners, and violently rebelled on the regular. But this isn't the story we tend to hear, and many African Americans have openly wondered whether and why slaves didn't fight back. Birth of a Nation could provide a necessary counterweight.

The film also centers African Americans instead of making them supporting players, a rarity even among Hollywood films specifically about the slave era. It's at the forefront of what will hopefully become a pattern of storytelling that represents the struggle to center the narratives of marginalized people in conversations not just in entertainment but in politics and social policy.

There's still time and hope to rehabilitate this film and what it stands for. And Parker himself is not beyond rehab, despite what some critics like Gay might contend. Parker can still provide a service to the community once he has truly grappled with his transgressions. His previous statement was unconvincing, but much can be said and done differently before the film's release on October 7 and in the days—and years—that follow.

"The difficult work of restorative justice and community healing between the aggrieved party and the perpetrator must be done in earnest if there is to be true redemption," said activist and filmmaker Byron Hurt. "I'm suggesting that we as a community of rape and sexual assault advocates intervene on the victim's behalf and demand this work from Parker and Celestin before we financially support their movie."

Hurt's prescription sounds an awful lot like a truth and reconciliation model that would provide a safe space for Parker to own up to his failings. If he is seen publicly making penance for what he's done, and if he turns his story into one of redemption, not wrongdoing.

Follow Deborah Douglas on Twitter.

Why 'Mafia III' Should Tackle Race Head On

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The first time I'd tried to interrogate one of Sal Marcano's men, things had gone sour: One of the informant's bodyguards caught me slinking down the alley toward him, and in the skirmish that followed, my target got away.

This time, though, I was prepared. I'd learned where the informant's guards were stationed through a tapped phone line; I restocked on ammunition (and put on a flak jacket for good measure); I blocked off a potential escape route with my own getaway vehicle. And this time, I wasn't as committed to going in quiet.

But when the situation exploded—literally, after a stray molotov cocktail caught a barrel of gasoline—there was still one thing I wasn't ready for.

My back was up against a concrete partition, service rifle in my hands, when a voice with Mafioso swagger and Louisiana grit called out: "The nigger's over there!"

Despite the air conditioning, the hotel room where 2K Games was handling the Mafia III demo felt a little warm. All at once the demo's three PR handlers, the game's lead writer, Bill Harms, and I—a black guy—seemed to realize that we'd stumbled into charged, tenuous territory. They obviously knew that we'd wind up here—they had probably run this demo dozens of times. But their response to being in the room with a black person while it happened, unfiltered, felt unpracticed.

As I move with violence down that back alley, I realize that the feeling I had wasn't frustration or offense, it was the nervous energy that comes whenever you spot someone taking a risk. All I wanted, suddenly, was for the team at Hangar 13 to tackle race head on, and with a lot more care than I had while plotting this small mission.

I also desperately hoped that they wouldn't fuck it up.

Mafia III is an open-world, third-person action game set in 1968 and set to release on October 7. It follows Lincoln Clay, a biracial Vietnam vet out for revenge after being betrayed by the Italian mob of New Bordeaux (a fictional New Orleans analogue). As players build their own criminal enterprise across the city, Clay and his own multicultural mob take down Mafia rackets, expose citywide corruption, and manage their own internal disputes. And this all happens in the fraught atmosphere of Louisiana in the late 1960s.

That atmosphere will be both a challenge and an advantage for Mafia III. By setting the game in the 60s, developer Hangar 13 has access to a wide catalog of familiar cultural material: musical touchstones, important moments of activism, huge changes in the national political character. According to Harms—who has been working as a games and comics writer since the mid 90s—the team primarily wanted to tell a classic revenge story, but also felt that it was important not to retreat from the decade's heaviest issues. If handled well, the team could leverage the complexity (and familiarity) of the 60s to create something powerful while still being a pulpy crime yarn.

As I turn this all over in my head, the action in the alley continued to play out. The shouted slurs and gunfire were quickly overtaken by a new sound: police sirens. A nearby civilian had heard the firefight and rushed to a pay phone to call the cops—something I could've stopped by having one of my own lieutenants cut the phone lines, if I'd been even more prepared. Only a few moments after the call went in, the police roared into the alleyway.

As Clay grabs the informant and begins to grill him for info, the police take up positions. I'm cornered. "Shit, I thought I was going to have more time," I tell Harms. He laughs, "Well, you're right near city hall." He explains that the police respond quickly in the highly populated, wealthy, and white downtown district. "But if you were in the Hollows—one of the poorer, much blacker districts in New Bordeaux..." He shrugs. In Mafia III, safety and justice arrive more slowly for some than others. It's the first time I've seen this element of structural racism systematized in a big-budget game. I didn't expect that, either.

I scatter a few rounds toward the police to keep them pinned down, sprint for my car, and drive away. Hendrix blares out of the radio as I dodge through side streets to escape the police chase and figure out what's next for Lincoln Clay. I'd softened up the Mafia's hold on downtown enough that I could now go directly after their corrupt construction business, one of two rackets that they had running nearby—each district offers unique rackets that reflect the local character of crime.

I set a waypoint for the construction site, and as Jimi brings the mood into a sunset sort of place, I find the moment to breach the topic directly, stumbling a bit to find the words. "It's, I... OK, so, I'm glad that you're tackling race head on." Harms nods along as I continue. "But I'm curious how you figured out the right balance on this, so that you can both include the very real and very important history of virulent racism without making people like me too uncomfortable to play this game. Like, how did you figure out how often to use slurs, for instance." I pull into the construction yard and whistle for some backup from some of my own hired goons before kicking in the gate—the absurdity of the situation is not lost on either of us.

"You know, it has to be meaningful," Harms tells me. "It can't just be something you hear nonstop without any context. There's always got to be a reason behind it." I duck behind a block of concrete—apparently everyone at this construction site is carrying weight.

I get my third surprise as I fight through the yard, while Harms and I chatter amicably about historical context—the RICO act, the decline of the Italian mob, the long march of civil rights. There are two goons on the second floor of the building I'm assaulting, and they have me pinned down and low on ammo. I flip through my arsenal to find a solution, and Harms stands up and walks over to the TV to point out a strange device I'd missed until then—a voodoo doll.

Again the room goes quiet. I slowly and curiously select the doll from my inventory. Harms explains with a sort of young writer's enthusiasm. "See, Lincoln Clay, he was a psychological warfare operative in Vietnam." I see where he's going instantly, but I'm not quite eased by this knowledge. "So, the thing is, he understands that these Italian Mafia guys are very religious, very superstitious. He doesn't believe in voodoo, but he knows they do!" There's a sort of magician's flair to his pitch: Ta-da.

So I toss the device up the stairs, and it makes a few strange noises, like if Tiger Electronics made a handheld magical fetish. And then the Mafiosi see it, and it's with a blend of terror and anger they shout. In my memory, what they're shouting is "That's NIGGER MAGIC!" but it might have been "nigger voodoo" or "nigger shit." The weighted word was there, though; it put that familiar smirk on my face, the one normally saved for awkward dinners with the casually racist parents of ex-partners or for when a movie that hasn't aged well slips comfortably into stereotype-driven humor.

Even now, with the distance of two weeks, I can't quite parse this moment. There's a version of it that probably works. I can imagine a film where a mid 2000s Wesley Snipes uses this trick to great effect, coming off like a badass who's turned the mob's own racism against them. Here, though, it falls flat. Maybe it's because it's not just a one-off gag but a mechanic that is returned to again and again over the course of the game. I'm just not sure if the brief distraction the device offers is worth the sonic assault it puts me under.

As I play, I wonder if players who look like me came up in the meetings where Hangar 13 writers pitched one another on this bit; players who've had the word "nigger" hurled at them as (and sometimes, along with) a weapon as we move through our days and nights. I know that the Mafia III writing team has at least one black writer on staff, and I wish he was here so that I could get his take. I wish I could ask him if this was what Harms means when he says that each time "nigger" is used, it's used with purpose?

If the purpose he imagined was this familiar instance of narrative shorthand, used to quickly vilify the random gangsters, then it has a long history of similar usage in Mafia stories. In explaining his love for Goodfellas, Anthony Bourdain zeroes in on this technique: "I think one of the things that's really interesting about this film is how every time you start to like Henry, and when we find ourselves rooting for what is essentially a murderous psychopath, they'll throw in some totally extraneous casual racism that they could have easily done without. ... You're constantly reminded that these are really disgusting people that you're liking and enjoying spending time with."


It is an old and well-worn technique—used in The Godfather, The Sopranos, and A Bronx Tale, too—but when deployed in these other Mafia stories, it still works, largely because it's done strategically. But here it seems scattershot, not working to characterize the villains of Mafia III so much as to fill auditory gaps. Video-game enemies "bark" to give the player information, from where they are in the environment to what tactics they're going to use. Sometimes these barks are ridiculous, sometimes they're frustrating—but they're always communicating something.

When I spend every firefight in Mafia III being called a nigger, though, the attempt at communication becomes more noise than signal. It is harshly textured and painful to hear, especially with this frequency and vigor. Maybe that is the desired effect, but I'm not sure that matters when the effect is so sharp a stab.

But Harms is right when he says that the solution isn't to retreat from the complexity and political nature of these issues. If Hangar 13 only leans on a poorly mythologized version of the 1960s as an aesthetic and narrative crutch, then Mafia III would be a missed opportunity.

Instead, I want Hangar 13 to lean in harder, to tackle the racial and political tensions of the 60s directly. When it releases in October, I want to adore Mafia III. The hours I spent with it showed me a game that is taking risks while simultaneously delivering on the fundamentals. I want Hangar 13 to bring to bear the skill they've used to make New Bordeaux feel vibrant and alive to this new challenge. If they can bring the harsh noise into tune, they might find the harmony between historical drama and pulpy crime thriller.

Follow Austin Walker on Twitter.

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Autobiographies: Empress Of Shares the Inspirations Behind Her Breakout Album 'Me'

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On this episode of VICE's Autobiographies, Lorely Rodriguez—the singer-songwriter known as Empress Of—details how she went from a jazz-obsessed adolescent to a breakthrough experimental pop artist. She explains how she became inspired by Björk, developed an intensive songwriting strategy after moving to New York, and sharpened her production skills to make her first record, Me.

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We Asked a Couple of Experts How to Nail Awkward Small Talk

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Illustration by Ben Thomson

You're walking around the supermarket, looking like roadkill, when suddenly you run into that person you added on Snapchat when you were next-level turnt at some party. You don't remember their name, but they recognise you—and they're heading over. You must now prepare for the smallest type of small talk in the world. It's going to be awful.

Despite the constant evolution of our social expectations, one thing that hasn't changed is awkwardness of small talk. Social media may have broken down barriers between each individual, but with increasing online confidence comes increasing anxiety about engaging in real life. You could be quite comfortable sliding into someone's DMs, but if you were introduced in person? No way in hell you're the kind of schmuck that would bring that up.

Faced with a lifetime of making idiots of ourselves, we decided to ask a couple of serious experts—Miriam Meyerhoff, a sociolinguist at Victoria University, and Talk Your Way to Happiness author Barrie Leslie—how to best navigate awkward small talk. Even if that might mean being sucked into the obligatory vortex of We just have to catch up. Here are their top tips:

Small Talk is So Damn Small Because We Need it to Be

Small talk is small because it's the first stepping stone to getting into... "heavy talk." Asking questions you don't really care about the answers to ("How are you?) eases both parties into the interaction and forms the base for developing real connection. "Psychologists have likened it to animals picking fleas off each other," Meyerhoff explains. "It's trust-forming."

Both Leslie and Meyerhoff say the whole purpose of talking with others is to get what we want from them, so if your goal is to get to a more meaningful conversation you'll unfortunately just have a sweat the small stuff first. But it's not easy to switch from one to the other. We can instantly identify when something feels "heavy" or "deep" because that's outside our expectancy realm, it's not an everyday experience to have a truly meaningful conversation with someone.

Leslie describes small talk as driving in first gear. It will get you rolling but won't drive you from Auckland to Wellington.

Context is Key

Depending on your environment, the awkwardness of small talk can be very different. It can be easier to handle at parties because you go in with the expectation of making social connections. You don't really wander out of a gym class—sweating, half dead—with the expectation that you'll run into some hot guy you used to go to school with. In these contexts there's a pressure to leave the interaction because it's not naturally social. However, this is when you'll get an added sense of satisfaction if you actually go beyond surface chat.

What Do You Actually Want From This Conversation?


As Leslie explains there's no surefire way to open a conversation. A good opener completely depends on your goal—what you want from this particular person. Do you want a closer relationship? Use more direct eye contact and say their name a lot. According to Leslie, most people will become more engaged almost immediately if you weave their name into a sentence. "Mirroring" your body language to theirs is also helpful.

But maybe the shit has hit the fan, and you've run into someone you once saw a lot of (an ex-lover/best friend) but hoped to never see again. In this situation you can close down the relationship by using less eye contact, a cooler tone of voice, and closed body gestures with arms coming across the chest area—if not actually folded.

Leslie also advises to keep to safe topics that won't be mutually upsetting. Most importantly: KEEP IT BRIEF. "Research indicates men are more likely to present themselves successfully and hide their vulnerabilities, while women are more likely to do the opposite," he says. So guys, don't talk about your threesome last weekend, girls avoid describing your recent failed relationship with that dick from your gym.

The Awkward, and Inevitable, Lull

Both experts acknowledge how tempting it can be to fill silences with chattering monologue. If you're trying to get a little deeper with someone, try asking an open-ended question, one that can't be answered with a simple yes or no. What did you think of the show? How do you know the party hosts? What are your thoughts on the geopolitical implications of falling oil prices? Or, whatever.

While, according to Leslie, women tend to do the communication work of questioning and laughing at jokes, contemporary women are likely to be looking for equality, which informs important criteria. In Leslie's experience many women believe if a man hasn't asked questions or laughed at her jokes he's disinterested. Alternatively if there's an awkward pause and you want out, see below.

Getting Out Alive

Here's where Leslie and Meyerhoff disagree. Both suggest shifting your tone of voice to excuse yourself, while referencing what you have to do (wash hair, get back to work, early night). Meyerhoff believes suggesting further interaction (to "catch up" at a later date) is less formal than darting off, while leaving the other person feeling valued. "If you ask someone to further your interaction at a later date, whether you actually want to or not, it's obvious you're thinking of their feelings," she says. Leslie disagrees, believing getting out is avoiding the inevitable. You're just skirting present awkwardness for future awkwardness.

When They Say "We Have to Get Drinks!" But You Definitely, Absolutely Never Want to See Them Again

If the thought of getting a drink to catch-up on "what's new" with your conversation partner makes you want to gauge your eyes out Leslie says pause, a lot. Break eye contact. Even the most persistent "catch-up" suggester should, at this point, realise other person already knows we are not going to accept the invitation.

The pause while you "consider" will warn the inviter they are going to be let down. Then follow up quickly by (keyword) gently saying you are too busy.

Embrace the Weirdness, You Might Learn Something

If you choose to slow your day down long enough to engage with people throughout it, both experts agree it can be really refreshing. Meyerhoff says engaging in small talk is not something to avoid but something to learn from. That connection, however superficial, can make you feel as if you've achieved something. Connection is what humans are here for anyway, right?

So the next time you see that girl you did one assignment with during first year uni your impulse may be to duck behind the nearest cardboard cutout of the Jamie Oliver, but consider taking the time to chat. It could just be worth it.

Awkwardly run in to Beatrice on Twitter


Calgary Cop Won’t Be Charged for Fatally Shooting Man Despite Watchdog’s Recommendation

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Photo via Flickr user FaceMePLS

A Calgary police officer who shot and killed a man will not be charged even though a police watchdog report recommended he face charges for the incident.

The Calgary Police Service (CPS) officer, who has not yet been identified, shot 27-year-old Anthony Heffernan four times—two in the head, one in the torso and one in the chest—at a hotel last March after staff found him in an agitated state in his room, and decided to call the police.The report, compiled by the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team, which is responsible for investigating incidents where police kill or seriously injure someone, or have faced serious charges of misconduct, found that, "there was available evidence capable of constituting reasonable grounds to believe that an offence(s) under the Criminal Code had been committed."

The Crown, however, decided that there was "no reasonable likelihood of conviction," and decided to recommend that the officer not face any charges.

The assistant deputy minister of the Alberta Crown Prosecution Service, Eric Tolppanen, said, "we couldn't disprove that the use of force was reasonable."

On March 16, 2015, five officers responded to a call at the Super 8 motel on Barlow Trail after Heffernan failed to check out of his room, and staff said he was unresponsive to requests to do so. The officers attempted to communicate with Heffernan from outside the door, and then burst in and found Heffernan holding a lighter and an insulin syringe, toying with both.

Officers tased Heffernan twice, both allegedly failing to immobilize him. The ASIRT report says that then, "depending on the description provided by the witness officers, still holding the lighter and syringe, Mr. Heffernan either moved forward towards the officers or lunged in their direction."

At this point the officer let off six shots, four of which hit Heffernan, with another striking a window in the room.

This all occurred within three minutes.

Immediately after the results of the report were announced, Heffernan's brother, Grant, told a press conference, "We are extremely disappointed."

READ MORE: Why Do Toronto Police Go So Easy on Drunk Driving Cops?

Heffernan's family, who have been outspoken about the injustice they feel he suffered, noted he was recovering from a drug addiction but "was a danger to nobody but himself" on the day he was killed.

The family is planning to launch a civil suit against the CPS in an attempt to acquire more information regarding the incident.

Police didn't notify Heffernan's family that he was killed until the story hit the press, 11 hours after it occurred.

The officer who shot and killed Heffernan was reinstated to the force after 30 days of mandatory leave. He was involved in another fatal shooting in January 2016, and is now on administrative duties.

Follow Davide Mastracci on Twitter.

What Parents Are Teaching Their Kids About Terrorism

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The Mutchler family at their home in Toledo, Ohio. Photo by the author

Rachel Mutchler, a physician's assistant, and her husband Jay, a stay-at-home dad, were planning to vacation in New York City with their young children last November when gunmen and bombers killed 130 people in attacks across Paris.

They feared a similar catastrophe might strike the American cultural capital. The Toledo, Ohio, parents took that grim prospect even more seriously after the State Department urged American citizens to be leery of crowds due to increased terrorist threats from Islamic militants and other groups. But the Mutchlers tried to weather the storm, broaching the subject with their eldest children.

"We talked about going and not living in fear," Rachel Mutchler told VICE. But when their eight-year-old son, Reece, began to have something in the vein of a panic attack, the parents changed course, ultimately settling on a quieter destination: Wilmington, Virginia.

"I was pretty sad," ten-year-old Noel Mutchler told me recently of her parents' decision. "But I also understood just in case if we got hurt or anyone else got hurt, it wouldn't be a good idea to go to big cities because that's where ."

Though the couple brought their kids in on the decision-making process in that case, they've since taken steps to shield the children from the images of bombings and mass shootings that have become virtually inescapable in recent years. Among other things, the family dropped their cable TV connection and are guarded when discussing terrorism.

This approach is in line with advice the American Academy of Pediatrics issued following the Paris attacks. Warning of the "lasting effects" violence can have on children "even if they are only learning about it through the media," the organization urged parents to "take care with the images that children see and hear about." So it is for parents raising kids in modern America, a place where mass shootings are baked into the fabric of national life and images of terrorists beheading captives and wreaking havoc on foreign capitals have become ubiquitous.

Terrorist attacks can be doubly troubling for Muslim children, according to Sameera Ahmed, the director of the Family Youth Institute, an Ohio-based organization that has conducted extensive research on the topic. Muslim kids experience the shock of learning about a terrorist attack just like their peers, of course. "But then they have to quickly switch gears, and they often get stressed out until information about the perpetrator is obtained," Ahmed told me. "If by chance the individual is Muslim, then they have to deal with the additional stress of being hypervigilant about whether people will harass them will they be safe in public settings."

Ahmed cites stereotypes presented by the media and scapegoating by political candidates as a major factors in creating a potentially hostile environment for Muslim American children in the aftermath of attacks. "When peer bullying does occur and there is name-calling of fellow students, it's because we've given the green light to do so," she said. "After all, if a presidential candidate can do it without ramification, why can't a kid?"

According to an informal online survey conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center titled "The Trump Effect" this spring, young people whose race, religion, or nationality has been lambasted on the campaign trail have seen a sharp increase in bullying from their peers.

Fear of terrorism, of course, spans the racial divide at the center of American culture—but some communities have their own unique kind of anxiety.

"I think about the possibly of a shooting nearly daily as I dread the day when my precious and adored black son transitions in society's eyes from cute to threatening and dangerous," one 38-year-old Philadelphia woman identified only as Rachel told the New York Times. "Crowded places or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, not so much."

Asra Nomani is a Washington, DC–based journalist, professor, and Muslim mother who says she doesn't fear her 13-year-old son will bear the brunt of a backlash so much as that he'd be caught in the wrong place at the time of an attack.

"He's a young man of color, but for me, it's not at all about him being targeted for his identity, but really just the fact that innocents are so much in the crosshairs today," Nomani said. "I see from a restaurant in Bangladesh, to the airport in Istanbul, to a nightclub in Orlando, that people are going about their daily lives and finding themselves with targets on their backs."

That fear came to a head last month when she and her son traveled to Dallas for a fencing tournament—just in time for the assassination of five police officers (and injury of others, including civilians) by a gunman irate at police violence against black men.

"We were walking through downtown when we stumbled upon the Black Lives Matter march that was happening to protest police shootings ," Nomani said, adding that Pokémon Go had just launched and her son was enthralled by the game. "We came into the park where the main protest was happening, and I see, on my son's phone, that there's a Pokémon right by some megaphone. Of course, there are 500 people around that Pokémon at that moment."

They were still in the vicinity when the attack unfolded and police cars flooded the street outside their hotel. For Nomani, the situation came to highlight the challenges of parenting in the time of so many unpredictable assaults on one's sense of basic safety that a kid playing a game could easily find himself in the middle of a violent altercation between a deranged man and police.

"This is the reality that our kids are growing up in here in America," Nomani told me. " hypervigilance because of these threats from so many different sides."

Especially after that weekend in Dallas, Nomani is determined her son be able to protect himself when faced with a gun or terrorist attack. While she didn't think about taking active-shooter or hostile environment training courses until she traveled to conflict areas in Pakistan for her job, she feels her son should have those skills to get by in what she sees as an increasingly volatile world.

"I want him, as a young man, to have some level of training so that he knows, at least, how to not make a situation worse," she told me.

Although they don't consider themselves "gun people," the Mutchlers, too, are trying to make sure their children know how to respond should their worst nightmares unfold. Noel and Reece have already started learning about gun safety and have even gone shooting with some relatives.

Even before the Paris attacks, the parents were forced to think ahead after a September 2015 incident where a gunman fired two shots and injured one person outside of a mall just a couple of blocks from the school Noel and Reece attend.

"It made me a little scared and nervous," Noel told me, adding that her teacher read to the class to try to calm everyone down. That anxiety returns to her at random moments—like while waiting for a video game to load or a movie to start.

"Sometimes just pops into my head," Noel said. "I try to think different thoughts, like happy thoughts."

Follow Beenish Ahmed on Twitter.

Is This First Nation Band Finally Voting on a Controversial BC Gas Terminal?

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Lax Kw'alaams photo via Flickr user A.Davey

Members of Lax Kw'alaams First Nation band have until tomorrow to vote for something that could potentially impact their lives for decades to come. But what that thing happens to be isn't too clear—at least if you read the ballot.

Here's the question band members have to answer:

"Provided the environment is protected, do you support council concluding agreements to maximize benefits for Lax Kw'alaams members and continue discussions with government and proponents to achieve successful outcomes for Lax Kw'alaams?"

According to poll records obtained by Discourse Media and reviewed by VICE, that's asking for a "yes" or "no" to Canada's largest-ever development proposal, a $36-billion liquefied natural gas terminal on British Columbia's northern coast. Pacific Northwest LNG wants to build a pipeline, conversion plant and shipping terminal at the mouth of the Skeena River, just north of Prince Rupert, BC.

It's a bit strange that this opinion poll is even happening, since BC Premier Christy Clark has said on three public occasions that Lax Kw'alaams already voted "massively in favour" of the project.

In June VICE spoke to representatives in the premier's office, who clarified the band had conducted a "community engagement process" that "was significantly in favour of providing approval for Pacific Northwest LNG to move forward under certain conditions."

That would make Lax Kw'alaams the last of five First Nations groups legally required to consent to the project. The band had previously rejected a $1.2-billion benefit package over 40 years in three unanimous in-person votes in 2015. At the time, the band council cited concerns over damage to salmon stocks. The bank of Lelu Island, where the proposed project would be built, is a place researchers have called "Grand Central Station" for salmon, with anywhere from 100 million to 1 billion juvenile fish passing through every year.

The reversal was an important milestone for a government that won elections by promising a multi-billion-dollar LNG industry. And was a talking point for the premier for much of the spring and early summer.

Read More: Did This First Nation Band Consent to a Massive Gas Terminal or Not?

VICE reached out to Lax Kw'alaams band council to figure out how this new vote will be used, since the premier has said the band already said yes. Mayor John Helin replied: "We won't have the results of the poll until Thursday, so I won't make any comments until the result is known."

Folks in the community raised concerns that the question was loaded, and the timeframe was tight—on a week's notice. The band is essentially being asked: environment aside, do you want "successful outcomes"? It doesn't mention LNG, only "concluding agreements to maximize benefits."

"It's like writing a blank cheque," resident and activist Christine Smith-Martin told Discourse Media. "They want us to sign a blank cheque that allows them to do whatever it is they want to do."

When asked if a poll that doesn't mention the company or liquified natural gas on the ballot could count under the government's definition of free, prior and informed consent, Christy Clark's press secretary Stephen Smart referred the question to BC's Aboriginal relations ministry. The Aboriginal relations ministry then referred VICE back to the band council.

VICE also asked if the premier's office stands behind its statements in June, that some kind of vote in favour happened in March. Smart replied yes, it did.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.


In Conversation with ‘Final Fantasy XV’ Director Hajime Tabata

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All screenshots and photographs courtesy of Square Enix

What I don't like so far about Final Fantasy XV can be written on the back of a beermat, in large, all-capital letters. I dislike how the car—so widely trailered—is effectively on-rails while on the road, even when "you," Prince Noctis Lucius Caelum, are at the wheel. I was hoping for the same relationship between it and its charges as Geralt had with Roach in The Witcher 3: that go-anywhere (within the confines of physical possibility) freedom. But instead, driving in FFXV extends to holding down the right trigger to accelerate and letting the vehicle steer itself, with U-turns and parking automated animations activated by a single face button. (I also dislike how cheap gas in the game is, but that's by the by.)

I don't like how the game's magic system is buried beneath unintuitive menus that, during a preview session with the game's first four hours, the attendant press officer has to guide the assembled journalists through. Chances are, without that, I'd never had began to play around with it—which would have been disappointing, as it's got a lot of customization potential, as ingredients gathered from the land, and from slaying enemies, can be combined with elemental powers for special effects. I'm still not hot on the mechanic Cindy's outfit, which remains unchanged from the Episode Duscae demo of 2015—though, my wife has a point when she says that if the weather's good, and the work is messy, why wear too many clothes? And that Afrojack-soundtracked trailer from E3? Kill its wub-wub with all the Firaga.

Everything else, though, I'm totally into. Consider me sold on the four guys hit the road premise, where Noctis is surrounded by three of his most trusted friends and advisors, who aren't simply around to blow smoke up his regal ass. The interactions between the quartet, even when heard in the game's original Japanese (forgive my settings preferences), are snappy and smart, often endearing and (so far, but it's only been four hours) never grating. The opening area's environments, too, are convincingly grounded in relatable ordinariness—this is a Final Fantasy game, but one that mixes a healthy dose of the real world into the usual formula of almighty monsters and spectacular summons. So there's no magical way to fix your broken car—someone's going to need a wrench for that.

'Final Fantasy XV,' "Reclaim Your Throne" trailer (note that the release date is now November 29)

The game's combat (which is graded, at each encounter's end) is fast and fluid, requiring a lot more than simply holding down a button to win—which was, remember, pretty much how Final Fantasy XIII played out. Yes, all attacks are mapped to one button, and defensive dodges to another, but using the bumpers and the d-pad you can combine moves with other party members, switch between magical weapons mid-combo, and take emergency evasive action via Noctis's warp ability—something you'll have seen both in prior FFXV preview videos and the (watchable on YouTube) opening to the game's accompanying CGI movie, Kingsglaive. It's a great deal deeper than it might appear in trailers, requiring detailed monitoring to appreciate which enemies are weakest, which are posing the greatest threat, and how you can adjust your tactics accordingly. Imagine a system dead center between the real-time action of The Witcher 3 and the turn-based group encounters of older FF titles, where the player must manage more than one avatar's moves: That's how it feels to play.

I'm not about to spoil any of the story—not that you can't find the details elsewhere—but let me confirm that the why behind Noctis and company's adventure is successfully conveyed without its natural melodrama descending into tired cliché. The plots of Final Fantasy games are often filled with world-altering occurrences, depicted via generously budgeted cutscenes, and this is no different—but there's a palpably personal drive to Noctis's quest that even those unmoved by the rising and falling of fictional empires will be able to relate to. There are loads of tiny details around travel and mission completion marking and character leveling that add up to a really appealing whole, which I simply don't have space to detail here. Basically, I'm excited for FFXV, and while it just recently saw its release date slip from late September to the end of November (2016), my preview with it leaves me unconcerned that this is because of any significant problems with its production.

But to really set my mind at ease, I spoke to the game's cheerful, personable director, Hajime Tabata, at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. Sat around a fake campfire—the game's foursome regularly take breaks amid the great outdoors, to replenish health, and level up—we begin where we must, by addressing that delay.

Hajime Tabata

VICE: Two months more to wait for Final Fantasy XV isn't a great length of time, given the game's been in development, on and off, for about a decade. But what areas for you were standing out as absolutely requiring the extra time?
Hajime Tabata: How long did you play the game for, so far?

About four hours, from the very beginning.
OK, so that opening area is one that you'll be able to have a lot of fun in. But if you played the game for 40, maybe 50 hours, you'll have come across areas where the playability, as it stands, isn't quite where we want it to be. And there are still some bugs in the game's later areas, and other parts where the optimization isn't quite at the standard we're aiming for.

The real issue is that if we tried to deal with the issues the game has with a patch, because we were thinking that way initially, there'd still be a lot of people around the world who would only be playing from the disk, without connecting to the internet for the update. They would see the game in what we consider an unfinished state, and that was a real problem for me.

That's quite a noble way to approach this. A lot of big studios would simply aim to hit that big deadline and fix the game afterward. The people who never downloaded the patch would simply be, I suppose, collateral damage.
We want to make this experience right for everyone who plays it. Like I said, originally I thought a patch would be OK, but I heard some good information that a lot of people still play their games offline, even people who have the internet at home. When I heard that, it changed my thinking on it.

The team must have been very reluctant to push the release back, especially given the fanfare for it around the Uncovered event earlier this year?
The decision didn't take too long. Once I had made the decision myself, I spoke to all of the important stakeholders in the game, and we announced it straight away. It was two weeks ago when I was really certain, in my mind, that moving the release to November was the right thing to do, and the discussions happened quickly after that, likewise the announcement to the public. We sent word out to all of our international partners, to get the message out there as soon as possible. But I think it was a good decision.

And what about the reaction to the delay? A small minority of internet dickheads aside, I think those who've been waiting years for this game aren't about to kick up a stink over two more months.
I know that people have different opinions on what we've done here, but I do try to avoid the forums where people say things without having to take any responsibility for doing so. I much prefer to listen to the opinions of journalists and speaking to fans face-to-face about things. That's where I think the most valuable information comes from.

Let's move on to the game's leading guys, the quartet we see in all the marketing: the player character, Noctis, and his colleagues Ignis, Prompto, and Gladiolus. Now, in a lot of Final Fantasy games, you begin with just a single protagonist, and you recruit a party as you progress through the game. Here, you start with a readymade one. What's the thinking there?
It all comes from the core concept of this idea of going on a journey with your mates. And we figured that, given that's the central idea, we don't need to go through that process of having to recruit allies. Starting with the party as a fully developed team, albeit with any backstory filled in by the movie and the other media around the game, made total sense—these guys already have a solid relationship with one another.

That direction, the journey with friends, does come from my own experiences, in my life. There are a lot of my personal experiences throughout the game, when I would go on road trips in my 20s. Although, obviously, Noctis is going on a journey to reclaim his throne and take his kingdom back; I was going on regular holidays. Nobody was coming to invade my home.

What I really like about the presentation of the game is how grounded it is in reality. Yes, there are fantasy creatures, some from the series's past. And there are amazing powers and magic. But you get around in a car, one that needs gas to go anywhere. You stay in sketchy motels and get your wheels repaired at a dilapidated garage, using regular tools. People just go about their business. Every little part just seems to fit into place, into this world that happens with or without you. There's a relatable, lived-in feel to the game, certainly around its opening area.
The feeling among the team on this game was that we really didn't need to do things as we had before, on previous Final Fantasy titles. We didn't need it to be over the top. Nevertheless, there were definitely people who initially found it hard to find the reality line that we were looking for.

Last night, all of the staff on the game that are over here now, at Gamescom, were discussing the relationship between fantasy and reality in the game, over dinner. We were talking about the behemoth, Deadeye, the monster that turns up (as seen in the Episode Duscae demo). Yes, this is a monster—but we didn't want it to be just that. We made it so that it was a very individual creature. He behaves differently to other behemoths. He has a history that's unique to him. So that's one side to this reality we're aiming for—but it was hard for some people to get onboard with that that entails. Nevertheless, I think we've found our reality line, and it's quite distinct from where previous Final Fantasy games have been. We've taken a step toward making Final Fantasy more grounded.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE Gaming's "Open Worlds" video on the fantasy landscapes of 'The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt'

Which character, from the core four, is emerging as the fan favorite?
Truthfully, the character we see most people cosplaying as is Cindy. We always see people dressed up as her at events. The four guys are all popular, too, but until recently Prompto (slim, blonde, no glasses) seemed like the least popular. We couldn't put our fingers on why, but that's been turned around now, as a lot of people like him. In Europe and America, I've noticed that Gladiolus (dark hair, big muscles) seems to be popular.

While the story of March's Platinum Demo has very little to do with the events of FFXV, it's definitely helped me establish a connection with Noctis, and more importantly what he's fighting for. It deepened that sense of what home really is to him, before starting the main game; which in turn intensifies the impact of what forces him away from it. Is that something you intended?
Well, thank you for noticing that. We're glad that it worked that way. We really felt that showing his childhood—and the other characters too, across different parts of their lives—through other media surrounding the main game, it makes them feel that much more real. Everything is linked back to that need to have an individual personality for everyone, or everything, of significance in the game, from the humans to the monsters. We want the real people in the game to be real people.

There are, naturally, nods to past Final Fantasies—Carbuncle in Platinum Demo, who'll appear in the main game too, and that classic little musical flourish at the end of a battle. But do you wish at all that you could leave all of that behind, that, I suppose, fan service, and totally make this your own? I suppose the battle system, divisive though it is, represents one massive stamp of uniqueness.
I'm not sure that there were any elements from past games that I had to include. I certainly can't think of any now. But the whole philosophy here was to create a world that you could explore freely, and have this spirit of travel and adventure in proceedings. That's why we have the seamless battle system in there, because without it the game would have to stop and start all the time. It's essential to the whole feel of the game.

But we couldn't have this as just an action game—we needed to make sure that there were meaningful party members around you. How they behaved around you, and interacted with you, was so important. So designing that system as we have, I think it brings an extra depth that maybe wasn't there in previous games.

While the combat split people initially, the more recent feedback we've had on it is very positive, and that's very reassuring. We have a lot of confidence that it's a lot more tactical than perhaps some people are expecting it to be, and the party development system, and how you customize your load-out. People seem to be liking it.

Each character has their own special, practical ability, and Noctis's is fishing. Obviously.

There's a lot of "wider universe" activity around the game. We've got Kingsglaive, the Brotherhood anime series (again, watchable on YouTube), the pinball-style Justice Monsters Five mini-game, and more. But how much is too much? Does all of this not distract people from the fact that there's a significant video game at the heart of everything? Does the extra stuff bother you at all?
I did have the worry, a concern, that because there are so many products out there around the game, that it would confuse some of the players, and the fans. But I've been sure that every one of these things has its own position, and serves a specific function. And also, that they all feed back into the main game, so they're not totally separate. The relationship between the game and all of the side projects is something that we took a lot of care over.

This game's been a long time coming, of course. You took over as director, exclusively, in 2014. What has the process, the experience, taught you about making games, and what lessons are you taking forward into new projects?
I've learned a lot from making this game. And it's worth saying that through the process of making XV, we now have a solid production base, which represents groundwork for the future. I have so many expectations for what we can do now, with the experience we have; I think we can move forward as a team and make even better games.

What taught me a lot, though, was the global strategy for this game. This whole thing, like what we're doing now, with me going abroad before the game is finished, talking to people while the game is still in development, that's something that I never really did before. I don't think that we, as the Final Fantasy studio, ever really did this before.

I was in London, just the other day, after we'd had a meeting about the delay. I had a day off, and I walked around, and I was thinking about how much more we could do with this game, with future games. I was looking at all the European architecture, and thinking about how we could mix that into these games, to make these fantasies more realistic, but also more fantastical. It was really inspiring.

But this, all the making of XV, it's all been fun—a lot more fun than it has been stressful. Of course, it's not been without some stress. That will always be there, whatever you make, because of the fans' expectations. They're so high for this game, and that does weigh on us when it comes to working out the best ways forward. But also, that expectation is a joyous thing.

Final Fantasy XV is released for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on November 29. Find more information at the game's official website.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

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Questions I Have for the Guy Who Tried to Jump Between Buildings to Impress a Woman and Got Stuck

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A man jumping, apparently successfully. Photo via Flickr user sabrina's stash

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So here's how I understand the situation: You are a college student at the University of Pittsburgh. You—and this is from local news reports—met a girl sometime during what turned out to be a fairly intense Monday night. You're out wandering Forbes Avenue, a strip of mostly closed FedExes and restaurants. OK. So far so good. This is about as close to being the main character of a modern country-rock song as you're likely to get. You, the girl, the night, liquid courage in your veins, the city stretched out in front of you. The possibilities are endless, well maybe not endless, but you are thinking there is a good chance you will have sex that night at least.

Now to seal the deal you take her to a roof of a nearby building. Hm, OK, interesting move. Then you want to impress her—alright, following you so far—so you jump from that roof to the next, or you try to. Huh, well. I'll let the website of Pittsburgh's Action News 4 describe the result:

"A Pitt student trying to impress a date tried to jump between two buildings in Oakland and ended up becoming stuck in a space about 16-18 inches wide... Emergency responders spent several hours working to rescue the man, including cutting holes through the wall of a Qdoba restaurant... A paramedic was lowered by rope to reach the man, who was rescued at about 6 AM and taken away in an ambulance. He was believed to have an ankle injury."

Now, I have some questions for you:

1. Are you OK?

2. How did you get to the roof in the first place? Was it your roof? Did you sneak into a building more or less at random just to sneak up there?

3. How drunk, on a scale of 1 to College Student Having a Very Late Monday Night, were you at this point?

4. What was the conversation like on top of the roof? Did you immediately start bragging about your long-jumping ability, or did she start talking about her ex who was a really good jumper, or what exactly was the chain of events here?

5. Why do you think that women are impressed by a man's ability to jump long distances? Is this a PUA thing? Is there a YouTube seduction guru out there who has a video called "Oh Yeah Guys Also You Know One Thing Women Love? Jumping." Is there a whole generation of young ladies who think Super Mario is really sexy?

6. Or was this whole thing because you got really pumped by the one-centimeter victory of US Olympian Jeff Henderson in the long jump? Because I understand that it was a pretty exciting event, but he trained for years to be able to make that 8.38-meter jump, and he did not spend the past several hours dong Fireball shots or whatever it is you were doing.

7. OK, speaking of long jumping, I hate to bring this up because of all that you've been through, but I looked on Google Maps to see how big this gap between roofs you were trying to jump was, and... well, I gotta tell you, it doesn't look all that significant.

Screenshot via Google Maps

Was this a "jump" or more of a "fall"? Be honest.

8. When during the several hours you spent wedged between the walls did you sober up? And were you able to reach your phone so you at least had something to do? Or were you just sitting between two buildings, staring at the wall?

9. Now that we're on the subject, did you have to go to the bathroom at any point during that ordeal? That might be the worst part—not the humiliation when you fell, not the physical injuries, not the fear that you would have to eventually saw off your arm or something a la 127 Hours, but the full bladder you were probably stuck with while you sat between buildings.

10. Were the teams of trained professionals who rescued you respectful, or was there a lot of those humiliating stares older men give younger men who have done something very stupid and now need an adult's help? Was that actually the worst part?

11. Are you going to pay for that Qdoba's wall or what? Jesus, I just realized—are you going to have to ask your parents to pay for the wall the fire department broke through because of your failed courtship jump?

12. Have you messaged the girl yet? Or is it taking you a little time to find the right words to express that perfect combination of contrition, give-no-fucks charm, and an assertion that no, really, you can jump a lot farther than that?

13. You obviously care a lot about your jumping ability—is the worst part actually that now this girl thinks you are bad at jumping?

14. Are you glad that news reports didn't name you, or are you secretly a little bummed that you aren't famous now? Couldn't you parlay this sort of infamy into, at the very least, a few sponsored Vines where you try to jump over things and hilariously fail? If you had some kind of income stream going from viral videos, maybe you could pay for the wall repair.

15. Are you OK? I hope you are OK.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: Sean Hannity and the Art of Selling a Mirage

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Sean Hannity and Donald Trump are sitting next to each other at a town hall event in Milwaukee. The room echoes with every cough and indecipherable provocation from the people in the rafters, Hannity and Trump unmoved by it all, sitting there looking the only way they ever do—Hannity, a squinty charlatan with a head like an elephant hoof, leaned back in his chair like he might at any moment unbuckle his pants; Trump, a Ziploc bag of microwaved mortadella, all wild hyperbole and unverifiable pronouncements delivered with the nonchalance of a man folding laundry.

Something distinct happens when two rich people who are getting richer off each other are on television together, especially two people whose opinions were never based in more than caveman impulse and the aggressive defense of their own egos. They don't discuss or refine; Hannity nudges Trump on something like a political swing set and inertia does the rest. Trump with simple-as-that solutions for defeating ISIS ("you use social media"), plans to reward the military veterans with the profits of Iraqi oil ("militarily, we wiped them out"), somethingsomething Hillary liberal media ("I guess she takes a lot of weekends off.")

Trump tosses we're-gonna-make-Mexico-pay-for-its out to the crowd like Mardi Gras beads; the crowd howls back at him. Trump and Hannity smile at each other like they're riding in a convertible.

Since announcing his campaign for president in June 2015, Trump has appeared on Hannity's television show nearly 60 times. During primary season, Hannity's interviews with Trump occupied 11-and-a-half hours of airtime. He says things to Trump like, "I've known you for over 15 years now. And I sense a real pain in there about how bad things are." He tweets Trump praise relentlessly and gives notice of Trump appearances with the abandon of someone leaving nightclub promo flyers under your windshield wipers. A piece in Monday's New York Times reported Hannity has for months given strategy advice to Trump's family and advisers. He posts blurry pictures of Trump's private jet on the runway in a way that borders on pornographic. Once, in an interview with GQ, he said Donald Trump was his favorite clothing designer.

There is advocacy, there are endorsements, and then there is this, something beyond.

Hannity cautiously steers his interviews with Trump toward the hysteric patriotism Trump can handle and away from policy specifics, annotating Trump's sentences as he goes, making Trump's haters his haters, wearing that hate like they're hating Hannity himself. It is an explicit collaboration, one man lint-deep in the other's pocket.

The hour in Milwaukee is almost over, but then, at the end, a pivot. Hannity has more to say but not enough time. Just call-and-response with Trump now.

HANNITY: When you say you'll rebuild the military, that's a promise?

TRUMP: We have to rebuild. It's all depleted.

HANNITY: And you'll send education back to the states?

TRUMP: A hundred percent.

HANNITY: And you'll make America energy independent? You can do it in four years?

TRUMP: It can be done faster than that. We have regulations that are absolutely destroying our energy companies.

HANNITY: And will you appoint originalist justices like Scalia?

TRUMP: Yeah I've already announced who the 11 could be. Eleven people from which to pick, and I want to get them as close to Scalia as I can.

HANNITY: And you will repeal Obamacare and protect our Second Amendment rights?

TRUMP: You know Obamacare is dying of its own volition. If you look what's going on with Obamacare. You saw what happened with Aetna.

HANNITY: And those are promises you're telling the people of Wisconsin?

TRUMP: One. Hundred. Percent. And I'm telling you, too.

It was conversation as frantic phone call; it was the scattershot, empty assurances Hannity and Trump have used to prey on insecurity their entire careers. It was not Make America Great Again. It was America: Tell Me You Love Me.

Sean Hannity is 52 years old. He has been telling people what he thinks since 1989, on a college radio show he was eventually fired from for doubting the legitimacy of the AIDS epidemic. This September, he'll have been at FOX News for 20 years.

His entire show feels like a conversation with your prom date's father while you wait for her to finish getting ready upstairs. He is all curfews and best behavior, my house my rules. He is not incendiary besides his gun-under-my-pillow, Eastwood-in-the-last-14-minutes-of-a-Leone-film half-swagger; he is not interesting or an instigator, he is not funny. He is just menacingly smug and boring. His favorite movies are "Gladiator, Braveheart, and Passion of the Christ." He's incensed by the carnal playland spring break has become ("how many beers do they fit in one of those funnels at a time?"), he responded to Obama ordering a hamburger with Dijon mustard like it was deviant sexual behavior. He is a man whose hot diss of Russell Brand was calling him "a druggie who dresses like bin Laden." Asked if he would ever wear skinny jeans, he responded, "What are skinny jeans?"

If you were asked to imagine a casual outfit Sean Hannity might wear and came up with a cellphone clipped to his belt and jeans that fit so poorly a giraffe could wear a pant leg as a turtle neck, well then here it is. His guests look either like the generically attractive white women conservatives want dating their sons, or the sort of decrepit reptiles they can trade stories about firearms with. "I've got a gun collection that's the envy of a lot of people, trust me," he said on his show in early August.

Hannity is something more covert, an inoffensive looking Trojan horse filled with rancid opinions, making his way to the stage next to presidential candidates.

He recites the same half-dozen inaccuracies about race, poverty, religion, and the scandalous tribulations of the Democrats on nearly every episode of his show. He is such a meticulous self-parody of what he purports to stand for that his function as a sentient human being is almost secondary to his function as Sean Hannity, Action Figure, included with every purchase of your Happy Meal politics. He is a pus-leaking boil that grew from the armpit of conservatism. Conservatism made him whole, made him real, validated his puritanical views on, basically, everything; conservatism legitimizes the idea that prejudice and privilege are not acidic but something charming, 8mm with the projector humming, that it's ingrained in an America we must return to, where girls don't wear bikinis without a man's consent, spring breakers don't get drunk on beaches because they don't get drunk at all, because Sean Hannity doesn't get drunk at all; they used to call him "half a Heineken Hannity," see? He seems like the sort of man who would prefer to have sex with his shirt still tucked in.

There are rabid, guy-handing-out-pamphlets-on-a-subway-platform conservatives like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones, deranged to a degree that keeps them quarantined on the fringes. But Hannity is something more covert, an inoffensive looking Trojan horse filled with rancid opinions, making his way to the stage next to presidential candidates.

That's the con. He's that man, but he's also this man: He's allegedly friends with neo-Nazis (he denies this), he excuses the murders of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown . He calls Cliven Bundy, a man who said blacks should still be picking cotton, "a really nice person." He once swore to Charles Grodin that Grodin could waterboard him for charity, such a tame interrogation Hannity believed waterboarding to be. Keith Olbermann said he'd donate $1,000 for every second Hannity could withstand. Seven years later, Hannity still refuses.

Most of his interactions on his show with black people are to dismiss them as radical and ignorant, or to find one who will dutifully corroborate the broad, speculative hypotheses he's reached about a culture he looks at with disgust and has little desire to engage with. When speaking of black victims of violence, he will try to rationalize it using every indiscretion the victim has made since adolescence.

When he has an argument with someone it feels like Hannity wants to slap the books out of his opponent's arms and shove his head in a locker. His insults are all "kicking your ass" and "coward" and "loser." He is a man who will never step foot in a world not governed by high school hallway diplomacy, a brat who won't grow up, because it's a lot easier to pretend, dealing in Fox News speak-and-spell rhetoric, politics mashed into a paste.

Once, he called into a Fox News morning show and said CNN "kisses Hillary's ass," and when the three Fox hosts lurched in mock horror at the profanity, he said, "I use those words on my show every night."

He is a man so comprehensively adherent to conservative ideals you wonder if it's all an act, a blueprint, if someone could possibly be so immovably dug into Reagan philosophies and this Ward-Cleaver-with-a-double-barrel ethos of his. There are times when he seems to be a robotic device whose back is tethered by an aux cord to a Fox News motherboard. But then he tweets, again, and again, and again, and again, about how many pushups he can do, not fake push-ups, "REAL" push-ups, because Sean Hannity is a REAL man, with weapons and a fully-functioning vas deferens and everything, a college drop out who made it all the way here anyway, on his own, beholden to no one, condemning you for living your life the wrong way, for the radical flamboyance of your idols, for the potency of that marijuana in your hand, slick.

You might think you're a man, but how manly could you be if you've never made pretend threats on television?

Follow John Saward on Twitter.

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The VICE Guide to Right Now: Grad Students at Private US Colleges Can Now Unionize

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Photo via Flickr user InSapphoWeTrust

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The labor movement won a significant victory Tuesday when the feds ruled graduate students at Columbia University who work as teaching and research assistants have the right to unionize, the New York Times reports.

While certain state laws allow teaching and research assistants at many public universities to organize, a 2004 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision held that teaching assistants at Brown University could not unionize because their relationship with the school was "primarily educational," rather than economic.

The board reversed that decision Tuesday, recognizing certain graduate students as employees under federal law. In a 3–1 decision, the majority—all Democrats—decided that students should be treated like workers if the university is paying them for jobs it oversees.

"We are elated that the NLRB has overturned Brown and restored our collective bargaining rights," Paul R. Katz, one of the Columbia graduate students trying to form a union there, told the Times.

Read: Do Workers Need Unions?

I Celebrated My Honeymoon at Berghain's Notorious Gay Sex Club

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Illustration by Lili Emtiaz

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We are told our entire lives that we are allowed to hate as many people as we want, but once we're married, we only get to love one person—to love and fuck them for the rest of our lives. Question that idea, and you're a threat to society.

I met my husband, Alex, four and a half years ago on Scruff, a gay dating app. He was supposed to be nothing more than a hot fuck; I had no idea we would end up married. But I ended up meeting my perfect partner, because we aren't afraid to allow each other the freedom to live the lives we want—to love without limits, which meant opening our relationship to others.

It took years of conversations and fights to finally find comfort in the arrangement. I have walked out of threesomes in a fit, pulling Alex out with me, because he kissed a guy too long or looked at him in a way I felt should be reserved only for me.

When we met our boyfriend, Jon, watching Alex fall in love with someone new challenged me in ways I never could have anticipated. Yet there was something beautiful to be found in the way they would hold hands or kiss. Watching them expanded something inside of me, and with time, I learned that I could fall in love with both of them, and that we could love each other, and others, without limit.

Alex and I got married this February, and we decided our honeymoon would be a five week trip to Europe. We wanted all the adventures we could handle; like our marriage, we decided our honeymoon didn't have to follow any rules. We could do what we wanted—our way.

That's why, when we found out about Lab.Oratory, a sex club in the basement of Berlin's internationally renowned Berghain nightclub, we knew we had to go—that taking part in a bacchanal 300-man orgy was the perfect way to celebrate our bond.

Berghain is part of an old power station in an industrial and remote neighborhood of East Berlin. To get there, our taxi drove us down a long, isolated boulevard. Once we approached the club, as if from nowhere, young, diverse hipsters in expensive club wear began to appear, walking down the middle of the street. Food kiosks shared curb space with limos and exotic sports cars; old ladies sold trinkets on the street.

While Berghain is famous for its hours-long line, Lab.Oratory has its own entrance, with its own door criteria. We learned that entrance came with a strict no perfume policy. If you were wearing deodorant or cologne, you were turned away in an instant, which makes sense, because the smell of men is part and parcel of the eroticism of gay sex.

The theme that night was simple: two drinks for the price of one, clothing optional. We were nervous—we'd been to sex parties and bathhouses in America, but nothing like this.

The space inside is cavernous and utilitarian, with cement walls and floors, punctuated by industrial steel beams. It felt like an orgy in an abandoned warehouse, dirty and dangerous. Men stood around in the main room bar in various degrees of undress, laughing and talking, while others fucked and sucked in the corners. But the real action goes down in smaller rooms throughout. Alex and I decided to get the lay of the land.

To say they fuck a lot at Lab.Oratory is an understatement. But it's not the fucking, or the rows upon rows of slings, or the tubs for piss play, or rooms for fisting, or the gangbangs you'll stumble into, or the casual way you can just drop to your knees and suck a guy off that make Lab transcendental. It's the camaraderie you'll feel while there.

One goes to Lab to fuck, above all, but it's a celebratory kind of fucking. You immediately sense that Lab is a place dedicated to the celebration of our bodies, our desires, our homosexuality, and our masculinity, a celebration of one another.

I had eyes for this big, beefy guy we saw at the bar. He was from South Africa, in Berlin for the weekend. Soon enough, Alex and I were passionately fucking him while others watched, touching and kissing us, the sound of sex everywhere. My whole mind soon shut off, lost in sensory overload.

Later, while Alex fucked a guy we met from Columbia, I knelt next to him, so he could watch me blow a tall redhead from London with an amazing dick. At one point, Alex broke away from his Colombian, and I blew them both, the two of them making out while I was on my knees servicing their cocks. Toward the end of the night, we met this thickly muscled Bulgarian man with a gray beard and salt-and-pepper hair. He and Alex fucked me together, whispering to each other behind me.

In those moments, I don't see Alex as my husband. I begin to see him as someone else. We spend so much of our lives on Earth navigating mortgages and bills, negotiating our personal needs against those of our families, friends, jobs, and larger lives. At Lab, I got to forget all of that. My husband became this sexy, big-dicked Dominican stud. I got to watch him fuck, seduce and flirt. I got to fuck alongside him and be shared by him with other guys. In those moments, we weren't complicated, and we weren't negotiating. Neither were they.

I don't believe marriage means shutting out my personhood or my sexuality. "I don't want to do this in the conventional way," Alex told me as we first discussed tying the knot. "I don't want a religious ceremony. I don't want to wear suits or to do anything that doesn't represent us." We didn't want to forget that we were still gay men—that our marriage didn't have to mimic a heteronormative lifestyle. It could mean whatever we wanted it to mean, because it was ours. Our rules. Our life.

After we left Lab, we took a long walk along a canal next to our apartment. It was cold, and the sky was turning pink. Alex held my hand. We stopped by a bridge, and he wrapped his arms around me, kissing me.

"I love you so much, baby," he said. "This is the best honeymoon ever."

Follow Jeff Leavell on Instagram.

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